The neat thing about the log4j thing was even a cursory explanation of the vulnerability made anyone with a passing familiarity with security say, “Why the fuck would that even be a feature?!”
Basically it involved parsing JNDI stuff which involved grabbing remote code (but that was a niche feature of JNDI in the Dev’s defense). Basically, you may think it is just something like variable substitution but can involve much crazier stuff.
Edit: and for more context, JNDI is typically a thing for getting a database connection stored on the application server. The idea being you just ask for “customer database” and don’t have to define the connection in the code. The server has it defined elsewhere. So in each environment it works the same. Basically glorified and standardized config file type of thing.
As a non-java company developer at the time, I think our biggest challenge was explaining to everyone that Log4j didn’t affect us. It took a non-zero amount of effort because a lot of customers panicked. To be fair, it was also an industry where confidentiality is important.
Oh man. I missed it by like a month. I graduated with my bachelors in December, and started in January. I was hearing horror stories from my new coworkers about how people had to cancel vacations to get stuff patched asap
Log4j was a fun one to watch unfold everywhere when things went haywire
The neat thing about the log4j thing was even a cursory explanation of the vulnerability made anyone with a passing familiarity with security say, “Why the fuck would that even be a feature?!”
Wait until you learn that PDFs support embedded Javascript.
??? What the what now?
What was it?
https://theconversation.com/what-is-log4j-a-cybersecurity-expert-explains-the-latest-internet-vulnerability-how-bad-it-is-and-whats-at-stake-173896
Basically it involved parsing JNDI stuff which involved grabbing remote code (but that was a niche feature of JNDI in the Dev’s defense). Basically, you may think it is just something like variable substitution but can involve much crazier stuff.
Edit: and for more context, JNDI is typically a thing for getting a database connection stored on the application server. The idea being you just ask for “customer database” and don’t have to define the connection in the code. The server has it defined elsewhere. So in each environment it works the same. Basically glorified and standardized config file type of thing.
this is cool
That was not a fun week to be a developer.
As a non-java company developer at the time, I think our biggest challenge was explaining to everyone that Log4j didn’t affect us. It took a non-zero amount of effort because a lot of customers panicked. To be fair, it was also an industry where confidentiality is important.
Also a lot of people were pulling it transitively.
Oh man. I missed it by like a month. I graduated with my bachelors in December, and started in January. I was hearing horror stories from my new coworkers about how people had to cancel vacations to get stuff patched asap